Unbound: No 193
Formula 1 and Amazon debut AI ‘Statbot’ to personalize broadcasts as often-predictable races end up with Max Verstappen winning
by MARK MANN AND BLOOMBERG | Fortune
At the Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday, Formula 1 plans to debut a new artificial intelligence “Statbot” with Amazon.com Inc., whose executives described plans for AI-powered personalized broadcasts to keep viewers hooked.
The statbot will trawl race archives and parse torrents of real-time racing data to feed context and trivia to broadcast presenters live during the Barcelona race, using technology from the Seattle-based company’s Amazon Web Services cloud computing division, said Neil Ralph, the tech company’s lead on technical collaboration with F1.
Is artificial intelligence making big tech too big?
by Schumpeter | The Economist
When chatgpt took everyone by storm in November 2022, it was Openai, the startup behind it, that seized the business world’s attention. But, as usual, big tech is back on the front foot. Nvidia, maker of accelerator chips that are at the core of generative artificial intelligence (ai), is now duelling with Microsoft, a tech giant of longer standing, to be the world’s most valuable company. Like Microsoft, it is investing in a diverse ecosystem of startups that it hopes will strengthen its lead. Predictably, given the “techlash” mindset of the regulatory authorities, both firms are high on the watch list of antitrust agencies.
The Bugatti Tourbillon Is A Hybrid With An Attitude
by Steve Hanley | CleanTechnica
In 1998, Volkswagen Group CEO Ferdinand Piëch engineered the purchase of all the assets of Bugatti in an all-stock deal valued at $50 million. Volkswagen’s goal in acquiring Bugatti was to revitalize the luxury brand and showcase its own technical expertise and innovative strength. The Bugatti Veyron first went on sale in 2005 with a 16-cylinder engine that was essentially two V-8 engines siamesed together. Piëch originally wanted a V-18 engine with two 9-cylinder engine blocks, but the W-16 that ultimately made it into production had almost double the horsepower — 987.
🌙 NASA - Best Photo from Last Week
Hubble Captures Infant Stars Transforming a Nebula
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image presents a visually striking collection of interstellar gas and dust. Named RCW 7, the nebula is located just over 5,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Puppis.
Nebulae are areas rich in the raw material needed to form new stars. Under the influence of gravity, parts of these molecular clouds collapse until they coalesce into very young, developing stars, called protostars, which are still surrounded by spinning discs of leftover gas and dust. The protostars forming in RCW 7 are particularly massive, giving off strongly ionizing radiation and fierce stellar winds that transformed the nebula into a H II region.
H II regions are filled with hydrogen ions — H I refers to a normal hydrogen atom, while H II is hydrogen that lost its electron making it an ion. Ultraviolet radiation from the massive protostars excites the hydrogen in the nebula, causing it to emit light that gives this nebula its soft pinkish glow.
The Hubble data in this image came from the study of a particularly massive protostellar binary named IRAS 07299-1651, still in its glowing cocoon of gas in the curling clouds toward the top of the image. To expose this star and its siblings, astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 in near-infrared light. The massive protostars in this image are brightest in ultraviolet light, but they emit plenty of infrared light too. Infrared light’s longer wavelength lets it pass through much of the gas and dust in the cloud allowing Hubble to capture it. Many of the larger-looking stars in this image are foreground stars that are not part of the nebula. Instead, they sit between the nebula and our solar system.
The creation of an H II region marks the beginning of the end for a molecular cloud like RCW 7. Within only a few million years, radiation and winds from the massive stars will gradually disperse the nebula’s gas — even more so as the most massive stars come to the end of their lives in supernova explosions. New stars in this nebula will incorporate only a fraction of the nebula’s gas, the rest will spread throughout the galaxy to eventually form new molecular clouds.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
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